With Over 34,000 GPUs And Three New LLM Startups, India Doubles Down On Self-Reliant AI Mission

In a major stride toward self-reliance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, India’s national AI compute capacity has surpassed 34,000 GPUs, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

Addressing the ‘IndiaAI- Make AI in India, Make AI work for India’ event held in New Delhi on 30 May, Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashiwini Vaishnaw said that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government's focus is on democratizing technology.

"Technology should not be left in the hands of a few. It's very important that a larger section of the society should be able to access technology, develop new solutions and get better opportunities. That's the philosophy with which IndiaAI Mission was created. We are making significant progress in practically every pillar of the AI mission," he said.

"Common compute, that's a very important part of the principle of democratizing technology. Common compute means creating such common computing facility so that a huge section of people in the country gets the opportunity to use that facility," Vaishnaw said.

"When [India] AI mission was established, we had taken a target of 10,000 GPUs... The enthusiasm and transparency with which the work has been carried out, in the first round, 18,000 plus GPUs have already been deployed and are being used," Vaishnaw added.

Vaishnaw further announced that additional 15,916 GPUs have been added to the existing 18,417 empanelled GPUs creating a total of 34,333 GPUs with support of industry partners.

This expanded compute capacity on cloud will provide a common computational AI platform for training and inference, crucial to develop indigenous foundational models and AI solutions tailored to the Indian context, the ministry said.

"34,000 GPUs is a significantly large number and this is a continuous process. The third round will also be very soon completed. That'll bring another round of GPUs...With 34,000 GPUs, the compute facility is significant annd we can utilize it to develop our AI ecosystem in a significantly good way," he added.

Vaishnaw shared that 367 datasets have already been uploaded to AI Kosh.

The minister also underlined IndiaAI Mission’s role in fostering reverse brain drain, and creating a comprehensive ecosystem encompassing foundational models, compute capacity, safety standards, and talent development initiatives.

He emphasised that these efforts are aimed at building a complete and inclusive AI ecosystem in India.

The ministry also said that three new AI startups have been selected for building India's own Foundation Model:

"The IndiaAI Foundation Model pillar within the Mission aims to develop and deploy indigenous foundational models trained on India-specific data. Since the Call for Proposals launch, 506 proposals have been received till April 30, 2025," the ministry said.

"On 26th April 2025, Sarvam AI has been selected to build India's Sovereign LLM Ecosystem, developing an open source 120 billion parameter AI model to enhance governance and public service access through use cases like "2047: Citizen Connect" and "AI4Pragati"," it said.

According to the ministry, in addition to Sarvam AI, three more proposals have been selected following a rigorous multi-stage expert evaluation:

1. Soket AI will develop India's first open-source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimized for the country's linguistic diversity, targeting sectors such as defense, healthcare, and education.

2. Gnani AI will build a 14 billion parameter Voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities.

3. Gan AI will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting "Superhuman TTS(text-to-speech)" capabilities to surpass current global leaders.

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